Forgotten (10 page)

            Johnny turns around, faces us, and slowly smiles. “Jack, finally. I was wondering when you’d get here.”

            That is
not
something I’d expect a seven year old kid to say. The shock must show on my face, because Johnny jumps down confidently from his chair and hurries over. “I’ll tell you, the accuracy of that device of ours is all over the place. Finding you has been almost impossible.”

            Again, that sounds strange. The voice is a seven year old’s, but the words just
aren’t
.

            “You’re probably wondering what’s going on,” Johnny says. “Well, let’s start with the obvious. The last time I saw you both in the same place, it was thousands of years in the future. Or possibly will be.”

            I look at him for a long time. “You aren’t an ordinary seven year old boy, are you?”

            Johnny smiles. “That’s the best part. I
am
seven. I’m also as old as either of you. Probably older, in terms of my memories, because I haven’t had them taken from me.” He looks back and forth between us. “Maybe I should explain.”

ELEVEN

 “
I
t’s kind of hard to explain,” Johnny says. He looks at us, and it isn’t the look of a little kid. There’s too much intelligence in it, or at least too much knowledge about the world. It’s subtly wrong, like seeing someone in clothes that are obviously designed with someone else in mind.

            “You saw Jack in your dreams?” I ask. I know we might not have much time right then, but I have to ask. We have to know what is going on here. Especially if it might mean that I finally get an explanation about why so many people seem to want me dead.

            Johnny shakes his head. “I did, but it’s not that simple. My dad thinks I see visions of the future, but it isn’t like that.”

            “Then what is it like?” Jack asks. He sounds slightly disappointed. Maybe that’s just because he was hoping to meet someone else who can do what he does. At the same time though, he sounds just as curious as I am about what Johnny has to say. He can obviously see just as well as I can that there’s something very different about the young boy.

            Johnny goes to sit on the big armchair in the center of the room. It’s far too large for him, but at the same time, it kind of seems right for him. “Do you know me, Jack?”

            He says that like they’re old friends, even though Johnny isn’t old enough to have old friends. Jack looks at him, and I want to ask how Jack could possibly know the young son of a presidential candidate, because that doesn’t make sense, but Jack nods.

            “You… there’s something familiar about you.”

            “Just like there was something familiar about Celes? About Grayson?”

            Jack nods. How could Johnny have known that?

            “I don’t get this,” I say. “I mean, you’re just a kid. But you don’t sound like a kid.”

            “I’m a kid,” Johnny says. “I’m seven years old. At the same time, I’m also a lot older.”

            “So how does that work?” I ask. Nothing about this makes sense, yet it sounds like I’m finally about to get some answers about what’s going on.

            Johnny looks over at me. “I don’t see visions of the future, Celes. I just remember it. It’s all jumbled up, so sometimes it’s like I’m just a kid, and sometimes I have decades of memories, and sometimes I’m both. That’s hard.”

            “So what do you remember, Johnny?” I ask, moving to crouch beside the chair to bring myself down to eye level. Then I stop myself. I’m treating him the way I would a small child, but if what he’s just said is true, then he isn’t. Or at least, it’s far more complicated than that.

            “I remember you, Jack, Gray, and me. Only we’re all about the same age, and none of us are kids. We… work together, I think.”

            That sounds familiar. I find myself thinking of my own dreams. I’ve never been sure what they meant, or how they could be true. “Where do we work together?”

            Johnny doesn’t look sure, and for a moment, he sounds more like a kid again. “There’s an office. A big office, like my dad’s. Not the one here, the other one, up in Washington.”

            “You mean that you remember us being something to do with the government?” Jack asks, and Johnny nods. That’s a strange thought. What would we have had to do with the government?

            “I’ve been seeing a lot of the same things,” I say. “But if it’s true…
how
can it be true?”

            “We travelled through time,” Johnny says, briefly sounding older and more confident again. “We travelled back, one by one, using the machine.”

            “We travelled through time?” Jack repeats. He doesn’t sound convinced. “Are you sure that you didn’t just dream all this, Johnny?”

            “Why would you remember me then?” Johnny asks in return.

            I nod. “It fits with my dreams, Jack. I remember… I remember one where I was insisting on being sent back somewhere. On going after someone who’d left.”

            “What do you mean?” Jack asks.

            I try to think back to the dream. It seems like so long ago now, except that if Johnny is right, then it isn’t. It’s something that hasn’t happened yet. “Someone I loved was lost. They’d used a… a machine, and they were gone for a while. People were trying to talk me out of going after them. They said it was too risky, but I went anyway. I loved them too much.”

            I look at Jack, meeting his eyes. I know that we’re both thinking the same thing in that moment. I reach out to take his hand, and for a moment there’s no power leaping between us. It’s enough that I’m holding onto him, and he’s holding onto me.

            “You, Jack,” I say. “It must have been you.”

            “I want to believe that,” Jack says. “I
do
believe that there’s something special between us. I felt it from the moment I was assigned to protect you. I knew that you were always going to be more than just someone to keep safe, Celes. It was like I’d already known you for a lifetime.”

            “Maybe you had,” I suggest. That’s a thought it’s hard to wrap my head around. What if Jack and I have already known one another for years? What if… no, there are so many ‘what if’s that if I start to think about them all, I’ll never stop.

            “Jack went first,” Johnny says. “He went first, and he landed first, which is probably why he’s the oldest of us here in this time.”

            “I’m not sure I understand,” I admit. It feels strange, asking such a small child for an explanation. “Why would that make Jack older? Why are you so young? Why are any of us younger than the ages I keep seeing in my dreams… I mean when I remember?”

            “It’s the way the machine works,” Johnny explains from his armchair. “At least, I think it is. Living people can’t survive the journey back, so the machine kind of just takes them apart. It stores everything about them, and then it rebuilds them.”

            “You mean like one of those teleport devices on sci-fi shows?” I say.

            “Except that this would be real,” Jack says thoughtfully. “That would explain why the fading machine can rewrite memories.”

            Johnny nods. “It needs to, because your memories, your personality, they’re what make you who you are. It does that, and it makes a body for you from your DNA, only when it does that…”

            “…it makes you as a baby,” I say. It’s the only explanation that makes sense right then. I guess it says a lot about my life right now that an explanation featuring devices that build people up out of nothing and give them their memories makes sense.

            “It’s a flaw in the device,” Johnny says. “I think… I think we didn’t know about it until after we started sending people back, and then once we realized, it was too late.”

            It seems strange that something like that could happen. That a device like that might be used again and again without knowing what would happen. Whatever happens in the future, we must have a good reason to send people into the past without testing the device first.

            I realize then that I’ve accepted it. I’ve accepted that I’m from the future, and so is Jack. I’ve accepted that I’ve come back through some kind of time machine. That seems like a lot to take in, but some part of me has already recognized it as the truth and gone with it. It’s almost the same as the way I seemed to know who Jack was almost from the moment of meeting him.

            “So Jack arrived first, and he’s the oldest,” I say. “What about the rest of us?”

            “I don’t know everything,” Johnny says. “There are parts I don’t remember. I know Jack went first. I know you waited for him, Celes, until you knew he’d forgotten the mission. After that…”

            “I followed him,” I say, knowing that it’s true even as I say it. “I knew I might not be able to get back, and by then we knew what traveling would mean, but I went anyway. I wanted to find a way to bring him back.”

            “Even though no one had done it before,” Johnny adds. He looks from me to Jack. “Then Grayson went after you, not long after you’d gone. I remember trying to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. He said that just because he advised you, that didn’t mean he had to
listen
to advice.”

            Jack seemed to be considering all that as much as I was. He looked carefully at Johnny. “Does this mean that you followed later?”

            Johnny nodded. “Years later. I don’t remember much about that part, but yes. It’s also why I remember more, I think. My memories are fresher, and when I saw Celes with Grayson yesterday, it reminded me of who I really was. Before that, even I thought I was just a kid who could see visions. But seeing them there like that… I’d recognize them anywhere.”

            “And we’ve ended up in the same place,” I say. “It’s kind of a coincidence.”

            Jack shakes his head. “Not really. Senator Hammond is interested in the fading machine through Johnny. The same is true of my father and Grayson’s. It’s that need to know what is going on that has brought us here.”

            “Maybe,” I say, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more going on than that. “But there has to be a reason why you came back here in the first place, right? So what was it?”

            Jack shakes his head. “I don’t know. I get the feeling that there was something, but I don’t know what it was. There’s just… a gap where it should be.”

            “That happens to a lot of people,” Johnny says, standing up. Like that, it’s harder to think of him as anything but a little kid, because he barely comes up to my waist. “They come back with the idea of changing the timeline, but the fading machine messes with their brains so much that they don’t remember what they were planning on doing. They get caught up in the lives they have here, and those kind of layer over their memories, so that eventually there isn’t anything left. They’re just people living out their lives.”

            I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about that, since nothing is actually happening to those people, but I
do
feel bad for them. What would it be like to have your identity completely wiped out? It would be like the real you being dead, wouldn’t it? Well, from the sound of it, I guess I’d know.

            “But Jack and I didn’t lose those memories completely,” I say.

            Johnny shakes his head. “You didn’t, and your powers have started to come out, which means that you might be able to complete the mission you came back for.”

            “What mission?” I ask. “And who are you, Johnny? I know you’re just a kid now, but who are you in the future?”